Technological progress in consumer electronics comes with immense environmental costs, including extraction of scarce materials, consumption of fossil fuels, and growing e-waste challenges. Eco-design has emerged as a promising approach to reduce the environmental footprint of electronics by integrating sustainability-oriented decisions early in the product realization process. However, most approaches focus on the product itself, not on the consumer who ultimately decides how to purchase, use, maintain, and dispose of the device. Many of the relevant environmental impacts of consumer electronics occur farther upstream or downstream of the consumer, who is often unaware of the full life cycle impacts. Many mobile products, like smartphones, have significant environmental impacts associated with raw material extraction and manufacturing. While not a direct consequence of consumer behavior, these impacts are magnified by unsustainable, such as frequently replacing still working devices, which requires new products to be manufactured and additional waste to be managed.
Thus, the design of electronic parts and accessories play a key role in sustainable behavior for many types of objects such as, but not limited to, consumer electronics, appliances, and buildings. To date, except in the case of the ‘Design with Intent’ or ‘DWI’ methodology, limited guidance has been developed to help designers create a product with a reduced environmental impact. However, the DWI method is complicated and focuses on how the designer thinks rather than how the user thinks. The application of this framework does not explicitly seek to improve environmental sustainability of the product (e.g., consumers can not influence energy consumption), although that may be a potential outcome.
The heart of effective sustainable design strategies is the human thinking system: understanding how consumers think about the products with which they interact. In this application, we present here a Sustainable Behavior Design (SBD) framework to link common design concepts (ergonomic, emotional, preventative, and interaction) with core aspects of the human thinking system to create features to make users aware of their behavior and decisions (reflective thinking). Alternatively, it may be used to promote sustainable behaviors even when users are unaware (automatic thinking). The SBD framework is demonstrated using a case study on a smartphone which can be applied to tablets, pocket PCs, PDAs, laptops, or personal digital assistants. The reimagined smartphone design integrates solutions addressing both automatic and reflective thinking systems, potentially reducing life cycle impacts by almost 30%.
A group of novel designs for smartphones and their accessories and packaging is presented in this application. Managing the environmental impacts of this product has been further complicated by the rapid changes in manufacturing, consumption, ownership patterns. Therefore, slow improvements stemming from supply side design strategies are not sufficient to overcome the environmental effect of this product.